The next 100 years of flight – part one

At 1035 EST on 17 December 1903, humanity truly took to the air. Orville Wright made the world's first manned, powered and, most importantly, controlled flight of a heavier-than-air craft. Their best flight that day lasted just 59 seconds, but it demonstrated for the first time that the air could be used for travel.

Now, 100 years on, passengers can fly non-stop halfway around the world for a few hundred dollars. To celebrate a century of flight, New Scientist's Paul Marks spoke to two people deeply involved in shaping the future of flight in the 21st Century.

Today, Pam Drew, head of engineering and IT at Boeing's Phantom Works research and development lab, reveals that personal aeroplanes for all are on the drawing board and why today's computer gaming kids could be the future's top guns.

Tomorrow, Terry Weisshaar, manager of DARPA's morphing aircraft structures programme at the Pentagon explains how telescoping and folding wings will help future planes to tailor their wing shape and size for each part of a mission.

A six-page illustrated feature with much more on the future of flight appears in the 13 December issue of New Scientistprint edition.

New Scientist: What are the major challenges for the next 10 or 20 years for aviation?

Pam Drew, Boeing Phantom Works: We've been pondering this a lot this year, with the Wrights' centenary. The key trends are the continued congestion that we expect to see in terms of urbanisation and population growth. We think these will have a big impact on how people travel. We can see in the next 20 years the need for more integrated air traffic management. And we may have a world where there's more multimodal transportation hubs - integrating land, sea and air.

NS: What does that mean - ocean-side airports?

PD: Sure, but also trains that connect into airports. That kind of thing you already see now, but the trend is for many more extensions of that kind of idea. As a technology organisation another thing we see is that we will always need to have safe and affordable aircraft, and another major aspect for the future is of course the environmental aspect. We have got to make sure that our aircraft are environmentally friendly - both when they are produced and when they are operated. That would involve greener engines, for instance.

NS: What's the big idea you're working on for the future?

PD: Boeing's philosophy in terms of commercial travel is focused on point-to-point travel. At Phantom Works we try to think further out, to the extreme version of point-to-point, which would be personal transportation vehicles where you can have this thing take off and land from your driveway. One thing we think very critical to that concept is the air traffic control (ATC).

NS: ATC in that environment sounds an unfeasible nightmare - but you think it might actually be possible?

PD: Yes. We think it could certainly be possible. What we are beginning to explore is what technologies you would want to deploy both in terms of the ATC and the flight controls on such a vehicle. Also, how they would inter-operate with one another so that we can have a safe and efficient air transportation system on a personal level.

NS: Let me get this straight. You are saying Boeing is quite seriously looking into personal flight?

PD: "Seriously looking" is too strong. Phantom Works does work that is exploratory - but I think it is fair to say we are exploring it.

NS: Any prototypes yet?

PD: No. That is when you will know we are really very serious about this.

NS: Are the main challenges in the software side?

PD: Personal flight is a very information and communications-intensive problem and all of it would be captured in software, so it is very much an information technology kind of problem.

NS: You would need some kind of collision-avoiding swarming software?

PD: Exactly. It's a key enabling technology area. We refer to it as "mission adaptive and multi-ship flight control". You could have for each particular vehicle intelligent adaptive flight controls that are able to optimise the performance of the aircraft depending on current trajectory and what's happening in the environment, or even in the event of a failure.

NS: What do mean by a failure?

PD: On a military plane, our lab has demonstrated intelligent flight control technology that allowed it to fly with entire components missing.

NS: Is this the neural network that works out what's missing from a plane's control surfaces and adapts the remaining ones to cater for the loss?

PD: Exactly. A big portion of an F-15's wing was missing and the pilot was still able to land successfully. This is the perfect example of the kind of experiment that we're doing today that you could project out as a critical technology for the future, for personal flight or for any type of flight.

NS: A big change in aviation in recent years is the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Where are you focusing this research?

PD: Phantom Works is looking at what the mission management systems will be in UAVs and the combat version, the UCAVs. We are looking at cooperative multi-ship technologies - this is a combination of the flight controls aboard a ship as well as the positioning technology that allows them to sense where one another is. So a combination of sensing and GPS and other technologies will allow us for instance to have formation flying UAVs. Or you could imagine formation flying of freighters - and in the long run that might be unmanned freighters.

NS: Will pilots on fighter aircraft become obsolete in the 21st Century?

PD: I suspect there will always be a role for the pilot somewhere in the system. UAVs do have pilots giving input from the ground. It's a different concept for a pilot but there is a person in the loop.

NS: Is it hard to find UAV pilots? I have heard that it is seen as flying a desk by the "top guns" and that retired navigators are being hired to retrain as UAV pilots.

PD: Maybe it's a generational thing. When I look at the computer gaming kids of today, I think they'll probably have no problem.

NS: Moving on to aerodynamics, what is your involvement with aeroelastic and morphing airframes, which would allow an aircraft to change its shape depending on where it is on its mission?

PD: We are the leader of the Adaptive Aeroelastic Wing (AAW) programme and have just completed flight tests on an F-18 at NASA's Dryden base. The flight tests demonstrated wing twist up to 15 degrees. So if we wanted to design a flight control system for a morphing aircraft we now have the data to do that. What we are doing with the aeroelastic wing is the beginning of the march towards morphing.

NS: What was the aeroelastic wing meant to do for the plane?

PD: The projections are for a 20 per cent boost in fuel efficiency. It gives better lift, for instance. In the future, morphing systems will be able to optimise an aircraft's performance: take off and landing have different requirements to flight. And for UCAVs, you have the concept of hunter-killer, when you are seeking or observing you have one kind of loitering flight pattern and then a different one when you go in and attack.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.